We got tickets to see the police.. wow!

Excellent news, Nicky and I are going to see The Police at twickenham with Mr and Mrs Plug.. (The Chudlings). As its my 30th this year, as mentioned in my previous post.. it seems fitting that we struck it lucky and not only did they reform, but we got tickets to see them.

Added to this, I am doing the Reading Beer Festival is rapidly approaching, 6th of May I think.. so much to look forward to right now.

Centre Parcs is just around the corner

Hurray, only a couple of weeks to go now, I can't wait, we have booked Centre Parcs over the Easter weekend, with swanky accomodation including a hottub. Darth Limpet and I are going to be celebrating our 30th birthday there.

We are just about to book our activities, lets hope there is more Greco Roman wrestling 'strictly torso dude'.. and drinking!

A little update

So I mentioned before that I was job hunting, well.. no more, finally some 6 weeks after I started the search I got me a new job. What's more its away from London, so no more ridiculous commute, hurray!

Its with a small company in Hungerford, and everything about it just felt right, I like the technologies, the location and the people, I hope it works out.

I will be sad to leave VNU behind, but the time is right to move on to the next stage of my career. I just have to get through the remaining 6 weeks of my notice period.. half way now!

So now Nicky and I just have to find a new house! Hope thats gonna be easy.

So now, its time to watch a cheesy horror film.. 'Last Cannibal World' and crack open a bottle of wine.

Well, back from Dubai.. boo, there's no sun here

Nicky and I just got back from our holiday in Dubai, see pictures at Flickr. We had a great time staying with our friends Tina and Kent. If the rent were a little cheaper, and there were more footpaths I would be out there to live in a flash, (12 months of sunshine).

So now its back to the UK, and getting the house ready to put on the market and on going career change trauma.. oh why is life never easy?

On the up side, I bought myself a Nintendo DS and it is great fun, looking to get more than just the one game though, only have Brain Age or whatever its called.

On the other up side Supreme Commander should be joining my collection of PC games tomorrow if all goes according to plan :-)

Fantastic Christmas break

So, despite a massive amount of free time from 11th December until 3rd January, an almost total silence in blog land... sorry, I was pretty much playing golf, or Oblivion, and after Christmas Medieval Total War 2. I had a brilliant holiday, as I had been saving up my holiday at work due to many busy project launches.

Hair update.. sadly the locks of the hairy Rossputin are no longer with us, as they were at the recieving end of too much abuse :-) I got called Lego Man, Playmobile man, The Hulk, Superman, and probably far worse things I can not remember! I am now more like Tintin again.

So a new year.. my resolutions, how am I doing?

- give blood (not yet)
- get fit (trying in between fighting off colds and travelling all over as per usual)
- address my work life balance (yep, doing pretty well on this one)
- couple of hobbies with Nicky (French, Squash) (we are still keen on these)

Its all up in the air right now, we are tidying the house up to put it on the market, and I am considering my career options, basically everything may change, watch this space

Second post so soon?

For a good reason, while we are on the subject of New Years Resolutions, lets add another 'getting organised'... its time I did just that, thanks to my continually disorganised state, see (Nicky is my Oracle/calendar/contact book), I have just let a close friend of mine down.. I was supposed to go to Breakpoint in Germany in April with him (sorry Emanuel), but have already booked and paid for a joint birthday celebration. Muppet!

So what organiser software to use? My phone I suppose, and SyncML... more details to follow.

First post of the New Year... 2007...

What will it hold? Probably going to move house, try to keep my resolutions :

- Give Blood
- Get Fit
- Don't take any bullshit

.. thats probably it for now.

Christmas was great, and the New Year at Darth Limpet's place, we dressed up as James Bond, and did some horse racing. Drank some great wine, and got lots of nice pressies. Including the main reason why 90% of my time has been spent in front of my PC... Medieval Total War 2, the best game since Rome Total War. Wow!!!

Got to finish Total War in time for Supreme Commander, which is coming soon :-)

My New Phone

I got a new phone a couple of months ago, the Sony Ericsson P990i. Its great I love it, but there are some small problems. The user interface is not consistent in the messaging section, sometimes I cannot delete multiple messages, this is annoying. More serious than this though, the keyboard has stopped working down the far right hand side.. and ironically the web browser crashes every time I go to the Sony Ericsson homepage.

On the flip side as already stated, the phone is cool, and I have done some cool stuff with it, like synching up with a centralised contacts database, and hooking up my encrypted wifi network at home :-)

My last Sony Ericsson phone the V800 was replaced twice with new handsets before it finally just worked.... the theme goes on.

The Guiness Surger

So Rosspo bought me a Guniness surger for my birthday back in April... finally, months later, in between my wine experimentation, I got to try it out on Sunday night...

See the evidence The Surge Experiment.

The pint did actually look exactly as though poured in a pub in Dublin, tasted great, and most importantly, the ultrasonics were geekily impressive :-).

On holiday at the moment, loving it.

I decided to use some of my holiday up and keep Nicky company while she is on her half term. We are not going anywhere, just spending some time together, and getting all the things in order that I am usually too busy to do, paperwork, keeping CV up to date, sorting out a new dedicated server for rossputin.org, so expect updates there over the coming weeks! It just goes to show.. when we are working, we just don't have time even to do every day things.. it kind of takes over our lives! Booo, lets push work down the stairs!!!!

Company of Heroes

Just completed Company of Heroes... and as its rare that I complete a game.. it must have been good! An RTS set in the Second World War, you can lay mines, build sandbag emplacements and shoot the Kraut! Marvellous. I highly recommend it.

Wow, did Oktoberfest on Saturday!

It was amazing... a completely different experience to UK beer festivals.. not better, just different!
The traditions were amazing, great costumes, ceremony. The atmosphere was astonishing before even the first beer was poured. One thing only was lacking, proper beer :-) The Whitebeers were tremendous, just too much goddamn lager! Yuck.

The downside was me chucking my guts up on foul lager, I am a lager girl!!!!

Glad I did it though, thanks to my most esteemed German Compatriot Emanuel, for organising everything, and making sure I got back to my hotel on the publisc transport.

The Beer Festival Run

Well I thought it was about time I picked this subject up again. The beer festival run.. I am aiming for 6 festivals this year, with 2 already attended, Reading and Talin... I hope to squeeze in The Pubecks Banks Arms festival immediately after getting back from holiday.

But yesterday I realised Nicky is out to destroy my plans.. by removing the possibility of me attending my annual visit to the Newbury festival!!! I am horrified!! What to do?

Sniff snif, sad Putin.

Second Thoughts on Keane's new album

OK, maybe I was hasty... just been listening to the album again, and this time, very unexpectedly, another song just started grabbing me, 'Nothing in my Way'. Marvellous, from nowhere, it grabs you, with close to the brilliance of some of the songs on the first album!

My first go at cricket in about 3 years

I went out and chucked a few balls at Rosspo in the nets today, it was great fun, and it seemed my accuracy was not as bad as I feared it might be!

Wonder how the shoulder it going to feel tomorrow.

So, I got Keane's new album yesterday

Just had a chance to listen to it today, and I have to say, despite a couple of good songs on it, it is nowhere near as good as their last one... hope we haven't had the best from them already, they have so much potential!!!

Wow, what a weekend we had!

It was our second anniversary last week, so this weekend, we finally went on a celebration weekend, that we had been planning for a long time. We headed up to Stratford Upon Avon, went in a rowing boat, had tea in some tea rooms, saw the birthplace of Shakespeare, stayed in a posh hotel... and to top it all off, we saw Anthony and Cleopatra at the Swan Theatre, starring Patrick Stewart!!!

It was the funniest, best acted Shakespeare I have ever seen, and while they are doing all the plays, I highly recommend going to see one! I ate rabbit for starters at the hotel, then a fine piece of Scottish ribeye steak.

Today, we followed on with excellent plans, and went to Warwick Castle on the way home. They had a working Trebuchet there!!!

Some pics of the whole weekend...

Our anniversary weekend pics

Mission Impossible 3

We saw Mission Impossible 3 last night, and both thought it was excellent. In my opinion better than the second film, and maybe almost as good as the first for suspense. Could have done with a little more chop-sokky, like Jon Wo's action scenes in the second, to make it almost perfect.

Thought the explosive devices in heads were great!!!

Roman Silchester, just a few miles down the road

Wow, its amazing what you don't know about major historical sites just down the road from you... http://www.flickr.com/photos/rossputin/sets/72157594147710066/... but this place has the best preserved Roman walls in Britain, and an amphitheatre.

The surroundings were beautiful, and there are plenty of great country pubs en-route.

We had a great day out here, and highly recommend it.

My family's new dog is a budding computer scientist

When I was at home a couple of weeks ago, I settled down to do some work on my laptop out in the conservatory.. and a little puppy jumped up on to the couch with me. She immediately became fixated on what I was doing.. following the movement of the cursor and windows around on the screen, and displaying an interest in all my interactions with the computer. This went on for an hour and a half.. and it turns out she is still doing the same thing with my dad, and sister when they are on the computer.

She is such an intelligent little dog, watching everything always curious.